1. Field of the Invention
This application relates to the field of telecommunications and more particularly to the field of electronic commerce.
2. Description of Related Art
In electronic commerce, such as conducted over the Internet, markup language pages displayed to a user using a browser typically include a mix of content and advertisements. Thus, for example, a user may see the content of a search engine, such as a search template, along with advertisements from one or more companies. The advertisements, typically referred to as xe2x80x9cbanner ads,xe2x80x9d may include links to other site locations, such as the home page of the advertising company.
As with other advertising, it is understood to be desirable to target the advertisement to a category of users. Thus, just as television advertisements are targeted to the demographic profile of the users who are believed to watch particular programming, companies wish to target online advertisements to the users. One method of such targeting is to display banner ads on pages that include content related to the banner ad. Thus, for example, a web page for an automobile dealer might include an advertisement and a link to a site offering financing for automobiles.
However, some web content is not clearly associated with a particular demographic group or user interest. For example, a search engine is likely to be used by a wide range of users who may be interested in a wide range of goods and services. Accordingly, a need exists for methods and systems that target banner ads to such users. The term xe2x80x9ctargeted banner adsxe2x80x9d is used herein to refer to such methods and systems.
Targeted banner ad methods and systems present a number of programming challenges. Among other things such methods and systems may need to provide relevancy ranking of categories of information related to a user""s query. Accordingly, a need exists to provide improved methods and systems for performing such relevancy ranking.
In methods and systems for targeting banner advertisements, it may be desirable to map categories of documents to super-categories of documents. Such a mapping may assist in obtaining improved relevancy ranking of advertisements to user queries.
Provided herein are methods and systems for establishing super-category lists for use in an on-line query tool. The methods and systems may include obtaining categories of documents, such as yellow pages categories, that may be retrieved with the query tool, each category having terms or words that appear in the category. The methods may further include establishing super-category terms for the documents, mapping each of the categories to a super-category term and establishing a super-category list, each element of the list including a super-category term and the terms in the categories that are mapped to that super-category term. Advertisement may be matched to the super-category terms.
Categories may be manually assigned to super-categories. Some categories may be automatically assigned, based on a ranking of the co-occurrence frequency of terms in the category with terms that appear in a manually assigned category. Alternatively, categories may be assigned to super-categories based on co-occurrence of terms in the business listing corresponding to the categories with the terms in the super-category.